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‘Guy in Real Life,’ by Steve Brezenoff

Steve Brezenoff’s third young adult novel, “Guy in Real Life,” begins when two teenagers literally collide one night in St. Paul, Minn. Lesh Tungsten, a metal-head with a heart of gold, steps in front of a bicycle ridden by Svetlana Allegheny, an artsy-craftsy dungeon master given to talking to herself in French, and the encounter leaves a deep impression on them both. Svetlana, because she is furious with Lesh for causing her sketchbook to fall into a puddle; Lesh, because Svetlana looks “like an angel. ”

Grounded for coming home drunk that night, Lesh joins an online role-playing game to pass the time. Starting as a crude, violent orc, he is bored until he begins again as “Svvetlana,” a character he creates to resemble the real-life Svetlana — albeit taller and bustier. Though she has no useful game skills, her “bouncy rack and great legs” quickly earn her friends among the other players.

Meanwhile, Lesh and real-life Svetlana bond in the school cafeteria when he drives away an unwanted suitor. Lesh is immediately smitten with this quirky, wholesome girl. As he falls deeper in love, he tries to reconcile his feelings for her with his friendship with fellow metal-heads like Jelly, a girl who seems to be Svetlana’s opposite. She swears, smokes and is sexual rather than sentimental. She fools around with Lesh and then dumps him when she suspects his lust might be devolving into love. Svetlana, in contrast, says things like “Graham cracker crust!” when she wants to curse, and actually swoons under duress.

As their relationship progresses, Lesh continues gaming as Svvetlana, and his use of the character feels increasingly like a violation: He even allows another player’s character to kiss her. His secret is dramatically outed when an ardent fan of the online Svvetlana tracks down the real Svetlana and corners her at her ­after-school job. The ruse is over, and Lesh must contend with both his best friend and his girlfriend knowing that he is a guy in real life, but a girl on the Internet.

“Guy in Real Life,” struggles to be about both gaming and gender. Like Lesh, however, its message is well intentioned but confused. It asks, “What does it mean to grow into a man?” and answers the question with binary gender roles. Svetlana is Lesh’s concept of an ideal girl: elegant, feminine, spiritual, sensitive; he takes on her identity in the virtual world because he sees her as the opposite of the unsentimental and tactless orc Lesh considers the default male persona.

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But Lesh is pushed to the brink of his gender only because he lives and plays in a world that seems archaic in its ignorance of gender nuances. Moreover, it is peculiar that the novel is about girls and gaming, but not girls in gaming. In a recent study, the Entertainment Software Association determined that 48 percent of gamers are female. But in the novel, there are only two kinds of people online: guys, and guys pretending to be girls.

At one point, Svetlana asks Lesh, “Do you want to be with me, or do you want to be me?” And although Lesh may not want to “be a woman,” to “wear a dress and grow breasts and all that,” he does want to have “passion and heart and beauty and a sense of connection to the world.” But are such attributes ­gendered?

This is the novel’s weakness. It introduces complex gender questions and then never acknowledges how problematic that conversation is. For teenage readers, the most troubling element is likely to be that Lesh never really suffers consequences for his decision to wear his girlfriend’s skin — without her consent — while he was learning what he wanted his own skin to look like. Guys (and girls) in real life shouldn’t accept this as a happy ending.